We’re not equal because someone says so. We’re not equal because an important document says so, an army makes it so, or you demand it so.
Our equality is based on three foundations of Christianity. These three foundations are only found in Christianity. We find sparks of them in Judaism but they never fully catch fire. All other religions result in a caste system, merit system, and/or class system. (And anyone who tells you Christianity includes a class system, know that they are utterly wrong and are referring to a compromised or pseudo-Christianity.)
First, we’re equal because we were created equal by a loving Creator. If you don’t believe that you were created intentionally by a loving Creator who formed the first human from the ground, formed you in your mother’s womb, breathed his own life into you, and called you to an extraordinary purpose of friendship with himself, you lose a key foundation of equality. The foundations of equality are undermined whenever lies denying a Creation by a fully involved Creator are perpetuated.
Second, we’re equal because we fell. We choose—along with Adam and Eve—to doubt God’s goodness (his good intentions and plans for us). When Adam and Eve abandoned fellowship with God and reached instead to place their will/their way/their wants on the throne of their hearts as idols, they set the wheels in motion for all of creation to do the same, repeatedly. The immediate result of this fall was self-protection and violence in order to “get ahead.”
If you don’t believe in the fall of mankind and insist on believing in the inherent (read: born with) goodness of people in the face of the facts that continually surround you and are all throughout history, you lose yet another key foundation of equality.
We were created equal on a very high level: in the image of God for the purpose of fellowship with God. We fell to a lower level or lower equality with Adam and Eve. In that moment, we became equally in need of redemption: reconciliation with Christ and a substitute for the death that comes as a natural result of choosing rebellious chaos instead of God’s order and perfection.
Lastly, we’re equal because Christ redeemed all of creation. The gospel is simply that we are all equally redeemed.
“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”—Galatians 3:28
Now there are only two types of people remaining: those who accept this work of Christ—this equality in Christ—and those who do not. Those who accept the work of Christ become citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Those who do not, choose to rot in death and the chaos of rebellion by remaining citizens of the kingdom of darkness.
We either remain cursed or accept the freedom from Christ's redemption. But we’re all still equally redeemed. It's the place of citizenship and the rights of citizenship that hangs in the balance. Do we inherit the natural result of disconnection from the Source of Life or do we accept the reconciliation or reconnection to the Vine himself?
I have heard (and read) people angrily charge God with being evil because he would dare to curse them…but we read the story of the Garden of Eden wrong. We cursed ourselves by cutting ourselves off from our Source of Life (Christ). But he doesn’t curse us—he didn’t curse Adam and Eve. He simply explains what has already happened—the thing he had warned them about. Adam and Eve had already received the curse and were already walking in it when God called to them in the garden. What came next was simply a natural result of this.
If we are separated from the vine, of course we’re going to wilt and die. If we are separated from Christ, of course we’re going to rot and die. Sin/death/rot is the natural result of being disconnected from the Vine.
Christ came to bring life again by re-attaching us to him—replanting us in him. We are called to reconnect and align with Christ the Vine. This is the abundant life in Christ he brought with him and we can spend the rest of eternity to discover.
Grace reconnect us to Himself.